UNITED NATIONS: Underscoring that a major transformation of the United Nations was underway, a top aide to Secretary General Kofi Annan told a US congressional panel on Thursday that the world body was ‘not over-sized, over-resourced or under-supervised by its member states’.

In a written statement to the congressional committee, Mark Malloch Brown, Mr Annan’s chief of staff, made a case for more funding of the organization, saying that the United Nations is ‘currently stretched too thin, in both material and human resources, to be able to do the job that people and governments around the world expect it to do’.

Making a case to strengthen the hands of the UN chief in the backdrop of the ambitious reform agenda, Mr Brown said ‘at the heart of our reform agenda, then, is the idea of how a Secretary General can be given back the power to manage, while at the same time governments recover the strategic tools to ensure accountability for results’.